TELEVISION

TELEVISION; The Season of the Heirheads

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: November 16, 2003

Correction Appended

ONE of the biggest bummers about inheriting a pile of money, if you believe the patrician class spy Nelson Aldrich, is coping with what he calls ''envy management.'' With resentment -- heavily spiked with longing -- beamed in their direction every day, rich kids have to come up with survival strategies. It's one of those pesky problems you can't delegate to the help.

Once upon a time, of course, the upper classes were enrolled in Envy Management 101 virtually at birth. That's where they picked up the three crucial club rules. The first: Be absurdly polite. (Hence the old joke that asks: Why do Wasps hate orgies? Answer: Too many thank-you notes to write.) The second: Pour money into philanthropy. The third? Hide. You were expected to have your name in the newspapers exactly three times -- when you were born, when you got married and when you died.

This fall, the young, bored and superrich (some from old money, some from new money, some from just slightly rumpled money) have come up with a fourth -- and devastatingly effective -- method of disarming America's simmering outrage: they have learned to utterly humiliate themselves on cable television. It's the season of the heirheads, and not just in politics.

On the oddly entrancing documentary ''Born Rich,'' which concludes its run on HBO next Sunday at 11:40 p.m., brand-name trust-fund kids lash out at their parents, sneer at the lower orders (''I can buy your family,'' one Draco Malfoy-like heir informs a schoolmate) and crow about nightly four-figure bar tabs. MTV's gleefully awful new reality series ''Rich Girls'' lets you watch Ally Hilfiger -- the designer Tommy Hilfiger's daughter -- and a wealthy friend ''do some damage'' on their families' credit cards. In the first episode, we got to eavesdrop on the friend's plan to lose her virginity to a poor lout who ultimately forfeits his chances. His crime? He did what the audience pretty much feels like doing -- he stepped out of the limo and lost his lunch.

And on ''The Simple Life,'' the new reality series from Fox, the socialite Paris Hilton -- she looks like what you'd get if you crossed Uma Thurman, a borzoi and Robert Plant circa 1972 -- agrees to spend a month living with (and condescending to) a farm family in Arkansas, along with Nicole Richie, the singer Lionel Richie's daughter.

I had to watch the first episode -- which is scheduled for broadcast on Dec. 2 -- through my fingers. There's the predictable pile-up of ''Sex and the City'' meets ''Hee-Haw'' jokes. (Hilton wonders if Wal-Mart is where you go to buy ''wall stuff.'') But it's when Nicole muses about dragging the farm family's fresh-faced 19-year-old son into a sexual ''threesome'' for sport that you may find yourself reaching for a Louis Auchincloss novel and a bottle of Scotch.

Clearly, there's something new going on here. While no one expects Paris Hilton to behave, it's impossible to watch these shows without asking yourself: wasn't there a time when a basic law of membership in the ruling class was that its true habits were not to be shared with the plebes? What's the point of exclusivity if you are going to broadcast the details?

We've never lacked for candid-camera glimpses into the lives of the rich and indolent. But in general they've been provided by outsiders, infiltrators, muckrakers, hangers-on. When these glimpses were delivered by genuine insiders -- Henry James and Edith Wharton come to mind -- they arrived under the polite and complicating guise of fiction. In ''The House of Mirth,'' for example, Wharton darkly satirizes the ''society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers'' into which she was born, but she doesn't pencil in name-tags under her cruel portraits. That was a task for the guests at the table, as Truman Capote reminded us more than six decades later, when he published ''La Cote Basque, 1968'' in Esquire. It was a catty exposé of the manners of Manhattan's most socially prominent ladies who lunch, and Capote was permanently banished from their company.

What's fascinating about ''Born Rich,'' then, is that it wasn't made by some professional documentarian -- as was last year's ''The Hamptons,'' directed by Barbara Kopple -- or by a voyeur hiding in the bushes outside the ballroom, but by a member of the very group under scrutiny, Jamie Johnson, a 23-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. If you believe him, he made ''Born Rich'' as a stab at Dr. Phil-like self-empowerment. He was tired of having to skulk around, of not being able to emote about his money -- he wanted to dispel what he calls ''the voodoo of inherited wealth.''

It's possible that Mr. Johnson really did see the film as an exercise in personal and class therapy. But that excuse feels like a smoke-screen. More likely, he was simply aware that it's no longer cool to coast on inherited wealth, and that, as Saul Bellow has put it, ''artists are more envied than millionaires.'' ''Born Rich'' is Jamie Johnson's bid for admission into a different, and absurdly exclusive, kind of social club -- one that doesn't cater to legacy candidates.

Correction: November 30, 2003, Sunday An article on Nov. 16 about television reality shows and documentaries that examine the lives of wealthy young Americans referred incorrectly to the director Spike Jonze, who was compared to Jamie Johnson, the filmmaker and Johnson & Johnson heir. While Mr. Jonze is related to the family that founded the Spiegel catalog (his real name is Adam Spiegel), he is not an heir.